Thanks, but No Thanks

By JOHN WILLIAMS

August 9, 2013

This week, Phillip Lopate writes about how authors deal with recognition — or with being ignored. Accepting his Nobel Prize in 1962, John Steinbeck struck a self-effacing note: “In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence — but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.”

Two years later, Jean-Paul Sartre declined to accept his Nobel Prize, saying he didn’t want to be “transformed into an institution.” The Swedish Academy retorted: “The fact that he has declined this distinction does not in the least modify the validity of the award.” But when it comes to trashing tributes, even Sartre can’t hold a candle to the great, splenetic Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, whose book “My Prizes” grimly recounts the honors bestowed upon him. He found the prizes problematic, the rituals surrounding them even worse: “While the musicians from the Philharmonic were playing, I thought over the entire ceremony now ending, whose peculiarity and tastelessness and mindlessness naturally had not yet had the chance to register in my consciousness.”

Delightful or Disastrous?

The Economist’s Prospero blog has suggested that some of the world’s worst sentences appear in Philip Mirowski’s new book, “Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste.” One offender: “The nostrum of ‘regulation’ drags with it a raft of unexamined impediments concerning the nature of markets, a dichotomy between markets and governmentality, and a muddle over intentionality, voluntarism and spontaneity that promulgates the neoliberal creed at a subconscious level.” On the flip side, the London-based Times Higher Education deemed the book a “delightful bramble,” though the author’s “own precise vantage point is deliberately impossible to discern.”

Quotable

“I don’t think I’m mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.” — Neil Gaiman, describing his fan base to The Guardian